Recently, AT&T announced their plans to hike up the prices from its current data plan offerings.

According to a Wired piece, the telecommunications giant has decided that starting on Sunday January 22nd, this is how data will work for new AT&T customers (excluding those with a contract already in place):

Although this is certainly bad news for some, it could mean good news for others if they previously fell into a bracket which gave them an excessive data allowance which they didn’t fully utilize.

But more to the point, it seems that this is a perfectly logical move for AT&T to make at the start of 2012 because of the current spurt of smartphone sales which I believe will continue rising, only picking up more steam on the way.

Because we live in a generation where everyone is used to being constantly in touch with one another, its little surprise that the mobile phone has extended this constant contact to a new extreme; constant online interaction.

To me, this decision by AT&T is a clever capitalization on the times. It’s a signal of the massive increases in data usage which directly correspond with the human fascination with, and desire to be enveloped in the digital world.